Shooting Star
by Kitty the drunken butterfly
Summary: Jack Sparrow contemplates his friends, family, future and his past as he spends a night alone upon the deck of the Black Pearl.


**Disclaimer**: I don't own PotC or any of the mentioned characters in this.

**A/N**: I forgot all about this even though I did it about a month ago. Obviously I had one of those moments when I just had to write some Jack Sparrow. I guess I'm very forgetful because I found it when I was going through my live journal (link at my website) so I figured I might as well put it up now. Hope you like it. : )

**Shooting Star**

"Respectable," Jack muttered to himself as he looked up into the night's sky thinking of young William Turner. He had meet Will a few years ago and it had been a strange meeting at that. Of course there was pirate blood in that boy but he didn't want to do much about it. He sailed with Jack once or twice before he had traded in his cutlass and pistol for diapers and a rattle. That had been Elizabeth's doing and a bit of Will's also for he had married that girl and the children hadn't taken very long to come in the Turner household.

William's job as a blacksmith had grown tremendously by the fact that he had married the governor's daughter. No doubt some of them came by the rumors they had heard of Turner being the son of the famed pirate Bootstrap Bill and the tales that had been spun from his adventures with Jack Sparrow. Yes, William was a proud accomplishment of a man.

"His father would have been proud of him," Jack murmured to himself. Young William Turner had done what his father was never able to do. He was never able to pull himself out of the piratical life that he had fallen into just as so many out of luck sailors did. With a family at home, Will Turner the senior wanted nothing more than to be with his family. His last trip took him to the bottom of the sea instead of home to see his wife and son, whom he had not seen for seven years and now never would see again. Bootstrap was a prime example of why some pirates never wanted married men aboard ship.

Jack didn't know much about the world William Turner had married into. The lineage of Jack's family threw a wide loop around anything that was considered well to do. He was brought up in the middle class and never had he dared to consider his family well off. A strand of bad luck could befall anybody and it did just that to Jack Sparrow's family. There was nothing left after Jack came back from his first internship. No home and no family. Everything was gone. So Sparrow did what he had to so that he could survive.

No one would ever catch Jack Sparrow putting on airs. He wasn't the type to want to impress no one, nor one to be impressed by fancy clothes and a snobbery that rich people were know to have. He couldn't stand how many of them felt that they owned everything. They never would own him and they could never touch his freedom as long as he stayed out of their greedy hands.

Will wasn't one to have much of that snobbery in him either. Knowing that his father had taken one of the most hated professions by the British always reminded him where his roots lay. He had worked his whole life to live through each day, unlike the many rich ladies and gentlemen who would have never noticed him had he not been in their class. William would be all right though. He was strong enough to take any of the gossip that surrounded him concerning his relationship with wanted pirates. Most of it was true anyways.

Jack turned his head upwards upon the night sky, nearly laughing at the twinkling stars above him. What did they know that made them wink at him with a seductive nature like that? Someone once told him that the dead were up there watching and he wondered if that was true or not...

He thought back to his mother who had only wanted the best for him. She had been proper and sweet but there was nothing she could do with the two rambunctious men in her family. Her husband was just like Jack, always needed to be free and be in the open spaces. It was the open spaces that had killed him too. Jack Sparrow had only been a little boy then but he knew that his father would never be coming back.

Mrs. Sparrow had wanted her son to grow up to have proper etiquette and to behave like a gentleman. It was a nearly impossible task for her to as of the high-spirited young boy but he tried his hardest to please her. She never asked anything of Jack as he grew up but only wished he would be better off than his parents would be. He had years of manners drilled into him as he learned to walk, talk, dress and act like a fine upstanding gentleman. Jack never forgot the things that he was taught and sometimes would fall back on them out of force of habit from the many years of training. Like so many young men, his least favorite aspect was dancing. Oh, he knew how to do it and could dance quite well when the moment struck him but it was just the point of it. Jack found it to be quite silly but no matter how much he protested he was still forced to learn how to dance. It was one of his happy early memories he fell back on many times.

His mother had loved to watch him dance and would laugh at him whenever he graciously bowed and asked her to dance. He was her little comedian whom she cherished so dearly even when he had grown into an adolescent. By then, she had become quite sick and he only happiness came from her only child. Even when her sickness began to kill her slowly she still wanted him to make her laugh. Jack knew he never became what she wanted him to be and as the stars twinkled down on him, he knew that she had known that he would never become what she had wanted him to be.

Jack was not the same as he had been as he entered his twenties. He was now an orphan like many of the children he had known about. Everybody at sometime did become orphans though. He knew that it was so, even since his first pet dog was killed after having her first set of puppies. They had become orphans and so had his parents after their parents had died.

Now he stood on his own pirate ship and that was long ago that his parents had died. He couldn't remember how many years it was anymore. Besides that, he couldn't remember how old he had become. He would guess that he was at least more than thirty but Jack couldn't pin point his exact age anymore. It had been years since he had known and perhaps he didn't want to know anyways. Time stopped for no one and Jack was afraid that someday he would realize he wasn't as young as he use to be and was just another old pirate was would soon meet his end. The end wouldn't be in sight if he continued to believe that there was no end.

The stars stopped sparkling for a moment then and nearly seemed to dim before a brilliant glimmer of light shot across the sky. Jack watched as it faded off into the distant horizon the Pearl was slowly sailing towards. In the distance, he could see the small dim glistening of morning creeping slowly upon the sea. Jack had spent another night up alone on the deck of the Black Pearl, thinking as he slowly steered his ship to his next unknown destination. Maybe he would go see William Turner and his lovely family or maybe he would turn towards home.

Home. Maybe it was time that he headed back there. He'd been away for so long and maybe he'd go to that small cemetery that overlooked the sea where his parents had now laid for years more than he could remember. They had been gone for too long and there was nothing he could say that they didn't already know. They had heard him whisper it on nights like this and they understood even if he didn't know. Even if the idea of home appealed to him there was something in Jack that told him to remain with the living and stay away once more from his homeland.

It had been a long time since Captain Jack Sparrow had seen William Turner and his lovely family. Truth be told, he didn't even really mind being call 'Uncle Jack' by the little Turners in the household. He actually quite enjoyed their childish antics. It would be good to see his friends once again. Sometimes it was good to have something to come back to.


End file.
